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After Roger Simon raised the possibility that Obama and Clinton would skip some of the early candidate forums and debates, Hotline now reports that Clinton will indeed attend the first of them, a Carson City, Nevada, forum on Feb 21. It’s going to be a long, long campaign season for the 2008 hopefuls, who will be seeing a lot of each other.
UPDATE: Raw Story reports that Obama’s RSVP is not yet in the mail.
Joe, the Romney campaign’s control-freakery makes for bad democracy, but I suspect it’s a smart strategy. Consider the way Mitt’s personal approval rating has bounced back over the past several weeks. As the GOP primaries wrapped up, Romney was roughly as unpopular as late-era George W. Bush. Now he’s about even with Barack Obama.
Since becoming the presumptive Republican nominee, Romney’s favorable-unfavorable rating has jumped to 50%-41%, his best ever and in the same neighborhood as Obama’s 52%-46% standing.
What changed? Well, for one thing, other Republican rivals are no longer attacking Romney. That helps. But it’s not like he’s had a free ride: the Obama camp has picked up where Rick and Newt left off. An alternate explanation would be that Americans are simply seeing less of Romney, and that makes them like him better.
In a recent piece about the Obama-Romney ad wars, Michael Scherer made the smart point that this election is different from past ones in that the incumbent no longer gets a free hit on his rival during the period immediately following the primary. The reason: super PACs have the cash to cover that gap while the challenger collects enough general election funds to keep pace.
